Once again, the power is up for grabs.

So it's almost the end of Big Brother season- five days til the winner is crowned and Michele someone gets the audience prize- and it's the time of the season I hate the most.

The time I like the most is actually pre-season, when I feel pretty free to love or hate based on absolutely nothing. (No, seriously, absolutely nothing. "I don't like her hair" or "He chose an ugly shirt for his publicity picture" will cause me a week of STRONG EMOTIONS til the show starts.) Once the show starts, the characters get more fleshed out with each episode, not to mention from everything we see on the feeds. And as the season goes on, I get torn between my feelings for the CHARACTER and my feelings for the PERSON.

On most shows, it's pretty easy to write it off to editing: when you're there for 24 hours a day and we only see you for one hour a week, OBVIOUSLY there's a slant. But with BB, when it's 24/7 footage, you know everything- and because we react like they're characters, I guess it's pretty easy to get kind of brutal. As the season progresses and I get closer and closer to the moment when they're going to see what the public says about them, it's HARD. Because I actively despise from of the characters and want them to suffer, but there are also PEOPLE behind those characters. People who are my age who are, in five days, leaving their big locked cage to find out that America hates them. And for the people, I really have sympathy.

I'm a giant nerd who follows the twitters of former contestants, so I know that some who I hated in the house who I think are pretty awesome outside of it (@ChimaSimone) and some who I now dislike even more, possibly to the point of getting banned from their Twitter because I said that behavior in the game is understandable but outside of the house it just makes you a jerk. (@rjrobot and I possibly used slightly stronger language.)

Today is the penultimate episode of BB11, and I am torn between talking cheerfully about what I think about characters, and thinking about how they get out. I mean, I'm twenty-four, and I still get unreasonably defensive when people say mean things about Amy from Little Women. I can't imagine how it would feel if someone named Amy Stern, who looks like me and talks like me and IS me, even if she's me as projected through a series of funhouse mirrors...

It'd be weird, is what I'm saying. Weird and disconcerting. And I don't know if I want to be that jerk who calls someone all of these names, even if I am speaking about the character, and even if they voluntarily walked in to all of this.

It's a complex issue, and given that I don't entirely have it clear in my head I'm probably not explaining it too well. But it's something that bothers me every year around finale time, and something I figured I should document.